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This week is the Paris Microsoft TechDays 2013 #mstechdays. And tuesday was the first day dedicated mainly to developers. Here is a view from a non-developer girl attending this event (in other words, an alien here).

The key message was : we love you and we want you to make money.

Microsoft and its dynamic team of francophone evangelists demonstrated during the morning session series of well calibrated messages (rolling out an average cooking scenario, but this is another story). With Microsoft platform and tools, developers were promised to be able to have cool design of applications, compatible with the multi-screen user requirements, driven by mobility today. In addition developers will benefit from easy coding of new user habits, like sharing content from an app, using touch screen in the Surface, scrolling in every direction, easy to create. And last but not least, any language would be supported from native C++ to web, with a great re-usability of code in both cases. Consistency of the features across the different environment of Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Windows RT was also repeated on a regular basis. Last but not least all applications can be distributed on the Windows Store App, where a team will make sure it is compatible with the rules (no worry you can pre-test it);.

As a mobile oriented person, I was greatly interested in the features related to mobile. Lets review some differentiators of the Windows Phone 8 platform.

A locked screen, just made for you. Locked screen of WP8 can be customized. Developers, if lucky enough to have their app chosen by the user, will be the user companion, being display as a background of the mobile screen. And MS development software enable seamless integration of the the data to be used when being elected as a locked screen.

The wallet is your chance. It is an aggregation of loyalty services and allows to directly access applications. In addition the application can embed some promotional mesage to the user and raise his attention on your super app.

Even the camera is an opportunity. The camera can easily offer the user to play with applications providing filters when he is taking picture.

Whatever is your favorite language, you can play. Web technologies were as present as old good technos. And the message was clear, make web app, make native app, make hybrid app, and we will make sure you will have visibility of our platforms.

Be innovative think NFC. The NFC technology was also promoted by the team, in the person of the only girl – Julie Knibbe @julieknibbe – who demonstrated the strength of integrated technologies with an NFC coupon transmitted from one device to another by peer to peer NFC, and was finally present into the wallet previously demonstrated.

In all cases, the simplicity of the code was amazing – well we all know that Microsoft evangelists are magicians.

A last word about security. The Microsoft solutions were promoted as highly secured. With new tools to control devices, new operating systems capabilities like the well known combination of bitlocker, secure bootloader and early antimalware, insuring integrity of the platform from a to z. But this will be detailed in later posts.

Code must also be a fun. The tradition in the tech days is to have a crazy session about codes. It is a session where evangelists are just demonstrating that any idea they think about can be easlily coded. Pushing back the limits of creativity. We had a chance to review a movie-generic a la Star Wars prepared in HTML5 and CSS3 by David Rousset @davrous, a machine to generate World-dictionnary-compatible sentences by David Catuhe @deltakosh , a fractal generator by Eric Mittelette, a super graphic application to manage form overlapping by Mitsu Furuta @mitsufu, and a joint Bluetooth/geolocalisation sandwich finder by Pierre Lagarde @pierlag and Julie Knibbe @julieknibbe. And-it-was-really-fun.

To sumup, that first developer’s day was enthusiastic, a lots of things learned, even if the continuous flow of positive messages was a bit scary – well there might be a problem somewhere, no ?

Stay tuned for other posts related to cloud, innovation, social media and obviously security…

Note to tech girls : a great advantage of being a girl in TechDays is that you never queue to go to the toilet : )

Take Mozilla, Microsoft, Tony Stark, add a motivated team of volunteers, and you have the recipe to gather more than 130 people during a W3Café in Microsoft Conference Center in Paris, along the Seine. The W3C Café appealing program was made of great plenary presentations and workshops – for the generous price of 5 euros ticket. Paris traffic jam made me missed the general presentation and when I joined the conference room, David Rousset @davrous was on stage, demonstrating with expertise and great sense of show the Internet Explorer 10 features [0]. David wrote in 5 minutes a simple webapp delivering RSS flow, with a look & feel compatible with the Windows 8 Metro style Windows 8-style UI Windows 8 Modern UI and spirit. On the basis of free developers tools, with a mixing of standard HTM5, CSS and javascript and specific WinRT APIs (some people said in the room, well Microsoft as usual…) he optimized a bit the application look. In addition, David suggested that the seamless and efficient integration of developers tools and designers tools would in the end support peace the conflictual world of developers and designers, becoming best friends of the world. Demonstration of a very simple application made by an expert like David, playing the role of the schizophrenic nice developer and the bad designer was convincing… Real developers and real projects will have a chance to experience on Windows 8 and IE10 in October 2012, David said. (more…)